One of the greatest problems that plague current business models is how to enforce and reward intellectual property rights. This problem has become even more insidious when the Internet persists data that may only be employed as a portion of a greater collaborative effort, yet the individual components of the effort may not be properly recognized as such. One attempt to control how rights are enforced is sometimes referred to as Digital Rights Management or DRM.
Digital rights management technologies attempt to control or prevent access to or copying of digital media, which can otherwise be copied with very little cost or effort. Copyright holders, content producers, or other financially or artistically interested parties have historically objected to copying technologies, before digital media. Examples have included player piano rolls early in the 20th century, audio tape recording, and video tape recording where the advent of digital media only increased concerns. While analog media inevitably loses quality with each copy generation and in some cases even during normal use, digital media files may be copied an unlimited number of times with no degradation in the quality of subsequent copies. Digital Audio Tape, thought by many observers of the time to be a probable replacement for the audio cassette, was a market failure in part due to opposition to it on grounds of unauthorized copying potential.
With the advent of personal computers, the ease of ripping media files from a CD or from radio broadcast, combined with the internet and popular file sharing tools, has made unauthorized dissemination of copies of digital files (often referred to as digital piracy) much easier. This has concerned some digital content publishers, leading some to pursue DRM technologies to try to prevent those actions. Although technical controls on the reproduction and use of software have been intermittently common since the 1970s, the term DRM has come to primarily mean the use of these measures to control copyrightable artistic content. Some DRM technologies enable content publishers to enforce access policies that go beyond preventing copyright violations, and also prevent legal fair use. These also tend to discourage collaborative efforts between creative entities.
While DRM is most commonly used by the entertainment industry (e.g., films and recording), it has found use in other media as well. Many online music stores, as well as certain e-books producers, have adopted various DRM schemes in recent times. In recent years, a number of television producers have begun demanding implementation of DRM measures to control access to the content of their shows in connection with the popular TiVo time-shifting recorder system, and its equivalents, for example.
An early example of a DRM system is the Content Scrambling System (CSS) employed by the DVD Forum on movie DVDs since circa 1996. The scheme used a simple encryption algorithm, and required device manufacturers to sign a license agreement restricting the inclusion of certain features in their players, such as a digital output which could be used to extract a high-quality digital copy of the movie. Thus, the only consumer hardware capable of decoding DVD movies was controlled, albeit indirectly, by the DVD Forum, restricting the use of DVD media on other systems until the release of DeCSS, which allowed a CSS-encrypted DVD to play properly on a computer using Linux, for which the Alliance had not arranged a licensed version of the CSS playing software.
The current DRM system does not satisfy all needs however. For instance, DRM opponents argue that the presence of DRM infringes existing private property rights and restricts a range of heretofore normal and legal user activities. For example, a DRM component could control a device a user owns (such as an MP3 player) by restricting how it may act with regards to certain content, overriding some of the user's desires (for example, preventing the user from burning a copyrighted song as part of a compilation or a review). An example of this effect may be seen in some systems in which content is disabled or degraded depending on the DRM scheme's evaluation of whether the hardware and its use are secure. All forms of DRM depend on the DRM enabled device (e.g., computer, DVD player, TV) imposing restrictions that cannot be disabled or modified by the user. These restrictions also tend to limit creative efforts between entities and make it difficult to properly compensate those who create valuable intellectual property.